Third contact envoys boo.., p.30
Third Contact (Envoys Book 1), page 30
“Contact forward!” she yelled. “Mid-room. Four, maybe five bogeys. Could be civs.” The knot of Tluaanto were bowed low, with knees, hands and heads all touching the floor. None appeared as big as the warriors she’d seen so far.
“Got ’em!” Wepps yelled from above and forward. “Ana, you’re free to move. Hecate—”
“Still clearing,” the Tactical called back.
Ana got up and slipped down an aisle between desks, bringing her close to the sergeant’s position as he hopped to the floor. She smelled charred flesh and fabric: over to the left, two enemy warriors were down with smoking holes in their torsos and heads.
“Hack it, I missed all the action!” Stines whined, entering the chamber late. He pulled up short, captivated by the two grappling warriors.
“They’re yours to watch,” Wepps told him. When he noticed Ana trying to pick out the council members from the five Tluaanto cowering on their knees mid-room, he whistled at her. “Forget them.” He stabbed a finger at a nearby data terminal as he closed on the frightened huddle of non-humans.
“Right,” she said and bent over the work station. She slipped her folding keypad and smartwire from a vest pocket and got to work, recognizing the data port she’d been shown back on Assured. The port was a configuration of three slim holes arranged in a tight triangle. Squeezing the smartwire’s end to activate it, she pressed it against the metal between the holes. While she caught her breath, the wire’s end parted into tiny filaments that snaked their way against and into the input apertures. She fit the other end of the smartwire into the keypad.
“Clear!” Hecate called.
With one hand training his rifle on the group of cowering Tluaanto, Wepps waved the other at the door on the far side of the chamber. “That’s front door. Hecate, that’s yours to watch.” He stabbed a finger back the way they’d come. “That’s back door. Stines, that’s yours—and keep an eye on … them,” he added, meaning the warriors down behind the bank of work stations.
“Bloody oath, I will,” Stines replied.
Ana checked the keypad, waiting for the green light and bright alert tone that would signal contact had been established. It wasn’t coming fast and she found herself bobbing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Come on, porquería, come on!”
Ahead of her, Wepps pulled items from the largest pouch on his vest. Three cakes of high explosive. Then the detonator.
Once the virus was on its way, Wepps was going to turn this place to atoms.
Yes! she thought as the keypad bleeped confirmation of a connection. Suddenly, nothing mattered so much to her as uploading the data virus and getting the hack out of here. She hoped Piers still had the yacht engines running. She hoped Chipper wasn’t facing any contacts back there—
Joyful whooping from Stines turned Ana’s head: Vazak had risen from behind the bank of desks, wiping dark blood from her knife onto her suit leg. There didn’t appear to be any tears in that suit. From his position covering the entryway, Stines flipped the Tlaa a thumbs up. She ignored it, vaulting over consoles to get to Ana’s station faster. Although Ana knew Vazak was on her side, watching that mighty body approaching at full steam, her ape-cat face flushed and her throat fur dark, with that huge blade drawn—holy Christ, it was scary.
At Ana’s side, Vazak considered the ovular monitor screen at the back of the work station. Ana clipped a data-wafer to the keypad—the wafer containing the mutated virus—and started typing. All of this had to be by memory and with a precise touch since none of the right-to-left gibberish running across the alien monitor screen made any sense to her. It didn’t need to, she reminded herself. She’d programmed the virus with a little help from that gambling addict Sintopas and one of the Orbital’s crew; it was solid. As long as her typing was accurate, the program she unleashed would bridge human and Tluaan systems to send that data-virus racing out into Domain Surface networks at lightspeed.
Vazak grunted something and it took Ana a few moments to recognize it as the English word Good. The warrior was already moving away and toward the seated captives before Ana could respond.
Vazak pointed at one of the trembling Tluaanto—Ana couldn’t tell their gender at a glance, especially not when distracted and awaiting a confirmation bleep from her keypad. Come on, come on, she thought. Vazak barked commands at the Tluaan individual—straightening, Ana noticed that this one wore a short robe over the normal Tluaan tunic and trousers, a garment with silver embossing along the sleeves and hem. After a moment, the individual crawled along the floor until they were two meters from the rest of their group. They glared back at Vazak, covering their fear with an exaggerated hauteur.
Vazak said to Wepps, “Con-sill.”
“Copy,” Wepps replied. He raised his voice. “We’re not taking these other four. Or incinerating them. Vazak, tell them to run.” He mimed it with his fingers and pointed to the front door.
Vazak frowned a little and watched his lips as he repeated the words.
Her expression cleared. “Run. Yes.” She turned to the four civilians and snarled three syllables at them. Nothing happened except that they drew tighter in on themselves. Vazak drew a deep breath. This time she roared the phrase at them. And this time, they didn’t hesitate, rising as one and bolting hard toward the entry Hecate was guarding. The Tactical slapped her rifle barrel against the backside of the last one leaving and cackled.
Wepps approached the last enemy individual—the Surface council member—waving them to their feet. They complied—grudgingly. Immediately, Vazak stepped in and scooped the individual onto her shoulder, the way she had with Hecate. Then she retreated around the desks at a jog.
Ana’s comms crackled—they’d been able to rig them to operate in a closed system away from Assured. They could communicate amongst themselves but not with their capital ship.
“Fireteam, this is Chipper. Pilot marks three aircraft inbound fast and low from the north. Devilfly is distracted and can’t engage.”
Wepps hit transmit button. “Close?”
“Very.”
“Troop carriers? Bombers?”
“Can’t be certain.”
“Copy.” Wepps whistled Hecate and gestured for her to come back. He hit the detonator timer and set out after Vazak. “Two minutes till boom-boom, boys and girls, let’s frog it!” He slapped his comms again. “Returning hot, Chipper. Vazak has one enemy prisoner.”
Ana squeezed the smartwire, telling it to withdraw.
Chipper’s voice crackled through their comms again. “Radar indicates first enemy aircraft has landed, north end of compound. First enemy aircraft has landed.”
Ana tugged out the data wafer and pocketed it, folding the keyboard as Hecate arrived at her side. She gave the wire a tug, but it wouldn’t detach. What was taking it so long?
“The man said boom-boom,” Hecate told her. “You know boom-boom?”
“Go if you have to. I’ll be done in a sec.”
“Leave it!”
“Can’t! Captain doesn’t want traces of human tech left here.”
“Screw him!”
Ana wondered if Hecate would have said that aloud if her ECF had been sending to Assured.
Hecate continued, “The tech’s about to get evaporated. Let’s go.”
“They’re orders. Just leave. I’m almost—”
A deep-throated shout from the direction of the “front door” sucked the breath out of Ana’s lungs. Warriors? How the hell had they—?
She flashed back to a memory of Vazak sprinting through the hangar and overtaking her.
“Shit.”
She trained her rifle on the door a split second after Hecate did. The very next second, two enormous Tluaanto came barreling through it. They wore clothing closer to human combat fatigues than to Vazak’s bodysuit. Their head-fur was shaggier than hers. And they were bigger. Both carried long knives, their rifles slung. Seeing the humans, they ululated and cut toward them, hurdling the first desk in their way.
Ana and Hecate fired simultaneously, a sustained volley that blew both hostiles off their feet and back onto the desk.
“Now will you go?” Hecate asked her, turning her head for a second.
In the second that followed, an energy bolt whipped by, centimeters overhead. Ana had the impression of three or four more warriors crowding the doorway before she dropped into cover.
“Holy mother!” Hecate hissed, collapsing next to Ana.
“You hit?”
“Nah, just pissed off.”
“Bad timing, huh?”
“Damn right.” A barrage of energy bolts swept overhead, turning patches of the next desks past them into molten slag. “What now?”
Ana’s keypad and smartwire were still up on the desk. She wished she’d listened to Hecate and left them thirty seconds ago—she was going to have to anyway. She jerked her chin at the “back door”.
“Head for the corridor. I’ll cover you. Then you cover me while I catch up.”
“So they can hit me while you hit them?” Hecate sneered.
“God! I’m trusting you not to run and leave me here!”
“It’s a dumbass idea, whoever goes first.”
Both women recoiled when fresh fire pounded the back of the desk they’d sheltered behind.
“That’s gonna burn through real soon,” Hecate said.
Ana pulled a grenade from a vest pouch. Hecate nodded and followed suit. They scooted to opposite ends of their cover, coming around into a crouch to face it. Ana slung the rifle over her back and pulled her sidearm—the Xerxian 12-mm felt a lot more comfortable than the Confed rifles, and it would be easier to fire blind over a desk. There came a temporary lull in the shooting, and with it the scuff of footsteps as hostiles repositioned themselves.
“Me first,” Ana said. Hooking her forearm over the desk, she fired four wild shots. When return fire hammered home near her, Hecate lobbed her grenade then ducked back. Ana quickly twisted the top of her grenade and depressed the timer. Enemy fire swung Hecate’s way, allowing Ana to lob her grenade too, careful to send it far past Wepps’s charges. The two women jammed hands over ears and opened their jaws wide against the pressure wave to come.
The twin explosions shook the floor and rattled the desk. Rubble peppered the room and smoke boiled quickly up toward the high ceiling.
“Now I’ll go first!” Hecate said and launched herself in the direction of the back door.
Ana popped up, handgun ready … But there was zero enemy contact. And judging by the mess they’d caused, there wouldn’t be. Her anxious gaze fell to Wepps’s explosives, sitting undamaged where he’d placed them. How much time had elapsed?
Ana turned and sprinted after Hecate. The other Tactical had paused by the door to offer cover if needed, so Ana passed her easily and heard her fall into step a few meters behind.
They were fifty meters out of the data center when the charges ignited.
The resulting pressure wave threw them off their feet. Ana tucked herself into a roll as she landed, coming to rest face up and in perfect position to watch the network of cracks race along the ceiling above her.
“Shit!” she cried and hunkered up tight again, arms over her head as the roof caved in.
8.4
They are risking their lives, not only to free their ship, Buoun thought, but to end the war between our domains. To save our species. To help us to rise above a half million generations of conflict. Truly, these humans were noble, brave.
And they have killed warriors! They are strong!
But would they be strong enough to get back off the planet?
Brushing dust and detritus off her vest and her legs, Ana rose shakily to her feet. Most of the fallen rubble around her was small, although one of those chunks of metal or concrete had gotten through her arms to glance off her head. Her skull still rang with the impact and she put her palm to the egg that was starting to rise there. The hand came away spotted with blood. Not much blood for a head wound.
Not so bad.
Then she looked around for Hecate.
Hecate was in trouble. The Tactical’s upper torso lay face up and dusty—but her lower half was stuck beneath a huge mess of debris. Her eyes were open and for a moment, Ana thought Hecate was dead. Then the eyes tracked toward her. And Hecate blinked. Ana hurried over, stumbling on fragments of roof. Part of the wall had come down to her left revealing the office behind it. She slapped at her comms but got nothing for the effort. Something must have hit her rig—or had it been the pressure wave from the explosion?
Hecate coughed dust from her lungs—it had congealed with her sweat to form a muddy sheen on her face. “Don’t think mine’s working either,” she grated.
“I’ll get you out of this.”
“We’ve … got more hostiles incoming. You need to leave.” She coughed again. “Feel like I’ve told you that before.”
Ana squatted, fumbling for a grip on a hunk of concrete. She strained at it, arms burning.
“That ain’t gonna work,” Hecate told her. There was a little blood trickling down through the muck on her face from a head cut. She chuckled. “Well, girl … Looks like you get your payback after all.”
“Payback?” Ana straightened, gaping at her in disbelief. “Now you admit you tripped me!”
“Satisfied, bitch?”
“You’re the bitch.”
Hecate shrugged her eyebrows, accepting. She turned her head back toward the obliterated data center. “I’ve got a grenade. I’ll take as many of these hair-asses with me as I can.”
Ana shook her head and was about to reply when she heard the scrape of footsteps at her back.
Stines. Standing forty meters back toward the hangar.
“A little help,” she called to him.
He gave her a sad shake of the head, then a wink, then a quick salute. And then he sprinted away.
Ana stared after him, disbelieving.
“Who ya gabbin’ to?” Hecate grated.
“No one, I guess,” Ana sighed. She crouched to study the arrangement of rubble to the side of Hecate’s position.
“What are you doing?”
Ana didn’t answer. Cross beams and spars had fallen on knots of hard-fabric and concrete and tiles in a jumble. But there was one particular steel spar—it hadn’t fallen all the way down, caught against a wall-stud.
“Might work,” she mused. “Can you reach your cutting laser?”
“The Confeds won’t wait, Jogi! Just go!”
Ana bent over, reaching for the exposed pockets on Hecate’s vest. The woman slapped at her hand, then grimacing in pain, reached into one herself and withdrew the laser for her. “What the hell you gonna do with that?”
Ana took it, stepped aside and took aim, running the line of concentrated light vertically along the center of the wooden stud, evaporating a channel as wide as two fingers. Some of the wood around it sparked, smoked, caught fire.
Hecate continued to rail at her. “Don’t do that. What are you aiming at? You’ll make it come down and hit me in the head … Ohhhh, I get it. That’s what you want! You are an opportunist bitch! No witnesses. Just shoot me and get it over with!”
The main spar shifted, dropped a few centimeters into the channel. Hecate, mercifully, quit jabbering. Then Ana heard shouts, down past the mess of the data center.
No, no, no. Gimme a little more time.
She kept on with the laser, widening the channel. The shouting got louder as Tluaanto picked their way through the other side of the field of destruction.
And the spar dropped!
It fell fifty centimeters, landing on one of the cross beams fallen across Hecate, jamming the farthest end down and against the floor, raising the other end twenty centimeters above Hecate’s thigh, freeing her.
“You—” Hecate started in a surprised tone. Then she started scooping smaller debris off her.
Ana tossed the laser and moved in to help. “Basic leverage,” she told her with a smirk.
“Great,” muttered Hecate, yanking at a strand of steel cable. “And if the whole thing had swung around and clamped down harder?”
Ana dropped the chunk of concrete she’d moved and took hold of Hecate under the armpits, dragging her free. “Then … I could still have … shot you in the head. Win-win.”
Hecate actually laughed at that. Or perhaps it had been a grunt of pain. Either way, she was free now.
“Can you walk?” Ana asked her, checking the data center. Figures were visible now, smudges amidst the smoke and dust. Their voices were louder. There might have been ten of them. Maybe twenty. And she had no doubt they were warriors.
“Can you look pretty?” Hecate replied. “Of course not. Check it.” Ana looked. Hecate’s left foot was turned 90 degrees outward. Her right thigh was bleeding through the material of her pants. “You can still shoot me.”
“Thinking about it,” Ana said. She kicked a sheet of ceiling panel closer. It was lightweight but tough, about two meters by a meter. “Drag yourself onto that.”
Hecate’s expression was dubious but she complied, using her hands to lift the bottom half of her onto the makeshift sled. The voices in the data center were closer, as were the smudges moving there.
Hecate had lost her PR19, so Ana passed hers over. “You’re covering our retreat.”
“Fine with me.” Hecate sat up straighter. “Not sure what the point of this is. The Confeds have obviously left us here.”
“While there’s life …” Ana said, quoting a Confed poet she’d heard somewhere. But she feared Hecate was right.
The ceiling panel had snapped away a little uncleanly, so that the metal edging formed a strong enough lip for Ana to take hold of. She turned her back to it, faced toward the hangar. Hopefully not an empty hangar. Ana bobbed down, took hold and started dragging.
It was goddamn harder than she expected. And rougher, the panel catching and snagging, slowing them down. “Hang on back there.”
“Already thought of that. I’m smarter than you, remember?”
“Heavier too. Ever think about going on a diet?”
“Ever think about shutting up?”
